I always think of Republic as one of the major minors, with almost a thousand movies produced over thirty years and more than a thousand over a twenty. Despite its Poverty Row origins (like Columbia!), Herbert Yates built up quite a prosperous little studio where they invented modern fight choreography, had a great miniatures department and won a Best Picture Oscar.

Bob

“Oh, yeah, I’ve been there. Pretty cool place. The people who live there? They love it. They’re nuts.”

How often do you see a movie from the classic Hollywood era that strikes you as a genuine classic, to be put up there in the company of The Adventures of Robin Hood or Casablanca or Yankee Doodle Dandy? If you're like me, you've seen nearly everything important from the sound era by now, the only surprises come from around the edges, the silent era (the 1924 Lord Jim), other countries (Poil de Carotte), early talkie indies (The Mad Parade) and so on.

But I had never seen The Sea Wolf— from that period when Michael Curtiz and the Warner Bros. studio could do no wrong. His films before it were Robin Hood, Four Daughters, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Sea Hawk, Santa Fe Trail. His films after it were—well, Captain of the Clouds isn't great, but Casablanca and Yankee Doodle followed.

But Jack London's novel is about... Nietzsche. A man who rules in the absence of morality and God on the sea. Something like that, anyway. Not the kind of thing they could pull off convincingly at Warner Bros. that early. At some point someone's got to come give a pious speech while the choir sings. (Is Otto Kruger in the cast? That'd be right up his alley.) Reassuring the audience that nobody could really believe that stuff. (No Kruger, but Barry Fitzgerald's in it. That must be his job.)

In fact, though, it's a powerful and extremely well-written film (credit to Robert Rossen, much later to direct The Hustler) that plays like a decade or more later, like the hardbitten tales made after the war, after all that we'd seen and been through that scoured away the old sentimentality. Three main characters find themselves by fate on a damned ship— John Garfield, a rebellious seaman; Alexander Knox, the London stand-in, a writer; and Ida Lupino as— well, enough references to Shanghai that her name might as well be Lil and her profession can be guessed. They all fall under the control of Wolf Larsen, the brutal captain of the ship. As someone said of Dinsdale Piranha, "'E used irony, and sarcasm," and that's what's unbearable about Larsen, a Captain Bligh is a mere martinet, but Larsen knows how to psychologically twist and destroy his crew as needed, to maintain his perch atop the pyramid.

Robinson knows this is about the best shot out of playing gangsters or G-Men who go after gangsters he's going to get at this time, and even if his physical domination is not entirely convincing, his intelligence is, and he gives a powerfully sour and sadistic performance. I'd have happily had more Garfield and less Knox, but Garfield, as the natural man who won't bow down, seems a worthy philosophical opponent to the tyrant, while Lupino is convincing as a woman at the end of her rope, convinced of her damnation, who never gets a scene where she shows that she's just a swell gal next door.

Sol Polito, whose credits are a history of the Warners studio in themselves, gives it a shadowy look— not noir, not overly artistic, but bleak and grimy. Korngold did the score, but doesn't have any place to write a big memorable theme, keeping it to moody atmospheric notes. The cast is full of memorable supporting roles— Gene Lockhart as a drunken doctor, Barry Fitzgerald as an informing weasel, Francis McDonald, Stanley Ridges, and so on.

For a late 40s reissue with The Sea Hawk, the negative was trimmed from 100 to 87 minutes, and the only surviving complete print was a 16mm belonging to John Garfield. However, Warners searched and searched and found the full 100 minutes on 35mm, and the result is nearly flawless, black and white cinematography of unusual richness, faces modeled in shadow... everything you could ask. I see prices around $17.99 online; it seems a modest price to have a brand new classic from the golden age of Hollywood's best studio. The only extras are a trailer (which is especially dorky) and a Screen Director's Playhouse radio adaptation from 1950.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

What's the coolest movie of the 1960s? Goldfinger and A Hard Day's Night remain quintessential experiences, but don't they want to be loved too much to really be cool? Matt Helm is complete uncool now, Blow Up is a dated piece of 1966, baby, Zazie dans le Metro is like having a psychedelic root canal, take Losey's Modesty Blaise, please.

And then there is Alain Delon's Jef Costello in Le Samouraï. Well, there's also Ryan O'Neal in The Driver, Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer, and Ryan Gosling in Drive, among others, none of whom would exist without Le Samouraï. Of course, he would not exist without Alan Ladd in This Gun For Hire and Humphrey Bogart in practically everything, among others—director Jean-Pierre Melville, who named himself for an American writer of sea yarns, would have been the first to admit that the Melville Creative Universe was old Hollywood myths shaken and stirred in his head.

Jef is a hired killer, he gets seen by a witness after a killer, the deal goes bad, he goes on the hunt for the guys who hired him. The whole genre of the sensitive, thoughtful hit man, a constant indie trope in the 90s (which would have baffled Cassavetes, who made crime movies to make money to make indie films about anything but thoughtful hit men and other Tinseltown inventions), traces back to this movie.

The film is shot in two-tone color—a drab monotone world of dark blue-gray, in which the only color most of the time is a face of pink flesh protruding out the top of a dark suit and a white shirt. Lumpish men, cheap Parisian apartments in which the walls look like the rinds of aging cheeses. The exception to this world comes only when we enter the world of women—there is one woman, white, Jef's alibi, her copper hair matching perfectly her copper walls; then there is a black woman, the jazz pianist who witnesses his crime, and she lives in gleaming modernist white with aquamarine paintings along one corridor. It is a heaven to which only wealthy men can aspire.

But Jef is no mortal man. No, Jef is an angel in a trench coat. An angel of death, but nevertheless a divine being; the police lineup into which he's picked up is like a parody of an audition, all these misshapen mortal Jef-wannabes and only the one true Jef, standing out in his trench coat against the sea of navy blue, a natural star. His iconic outfit (trench coat and fedora) is redistributed to other lesser Jefs, and a witness picks out the pieces and reassembles Jef, because he sees the pieces of perfection wanting to be put back together again. (Jef's outfit raises a question, given that entire reels are given to eluding the police on the Metro—why doesn't he change into a disguise? Because he's Jef, and you don't profane Jef-ness with a lesser look.)

I suspect Melville never had that much money for his movies, but it didn't matter because he knew Paris so well that he could walk out on the streets with a camera and Alain Delon, and compose an instant poem of that place in Paris. Criterion's disc renders it as beautifully as the austere film could wish, which is to say razor sharp but not too pretty, not oversaturating the color to make this gray film too lively. It seems to have the musty smell of the stairwell in a French apartment building throughout— at least, in the streets where men do their business.

Extras include a documentary about Melville and Delon's collaborations, and some interview clips with Melville and others; the booklet contains an essay by David Thomson, a piece with John Woo (The Killer) talking about the film on 1970s Hong Kong culture, and an excellent interview with Melville in which he explains his conception of the character and why he acts the way he does. There's also an original French trailer, with which you can only empathize as it shows the utter hopelessness of condensing this film's deadpan cool into the action beats of a trailer.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

Speaking of unknown near-classics starring John Garfield, directed by Michael Curtiz, and based on books about sailors...

THE BREAKING POINT (1950) 97m ***1/2 (Blu-ray released August 8, 2017)

It's well known that Howard Hawks had a rivalry with one film— Rio Bravo was created as an alternate telling of the same basic setup as High Noon, in which Gary Cooper has only a woman, a drunk, an old man and a kid to help him defend his town against the bad guys; in Rio Bravo, asked if that's all he got, John Wayne replies "That's what I've got," as in, I'm a sheriff and I do my job with the tools at hand and don't complain about it.

But I've always thought that Hawks felt a certain rivalry with Michael Curtiz's Casablanca as well. Watch Only Angels Have Wings and you'll get a distinct Rick's precursor vibe from Cary Grant's airport in South America, the place where every path crosses in that town. While To Have and Have Not seems meant to be a kind of answer to Casablanca, that doesn't have time for a 40-year-old Bogart being lovesick like a high school kid; Bogart and Bacall are insolent and frankly carnal, in the model of all Hawks relationships, and there are some like Dave Kehr who regard it as the superior film for that reason. Well, I think it's a swell picture but there's so much in the peerless Casablanca that is not in Hawks' world, that makes it the summation of America fighting a war with Warner Bros. smart-aleckiness toward those insufferably pompous Nazis, the Douglas Dumbrilles of world conquest.

But there's another chapter in this rivalry—which is that six years after To Have and Have Not, Michael Curtiz made another version of the same Hemingway book. Which is not exactly a secret (I'm sure it plays regularly on TCM) but it's surely getting more attention than it's had since 1950 with this Criterion release, easily the least-known film they've licensed from Warner in a series that has recently included the likes of The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year.

The screenplay by Ranald MacDougall significantly alters the story—not least because the Bogart character, played by John Garfield, has a wife and kids like in a 50s sitcom. He was a war hero "who felt eight feet tall" back then, but now he's falling behind in every way trying to make it as a charter captain and provide for his family. Wallace Ford as a sleazy lawyer who could have walked in from The Lady From Shanghai offers him a deal only a desperate man would take, involving four gangster-y types (think Kubrick's The Killing) and a rendezvous 50 miles out to sea. Garfield is that desperate man, and he takes it, no wartime sympathies for the Free French involved.

In some ways The Breaking Point feels like a 1970s remake of an old movie, in which the romance of it all is stripped away and it's told in drably realistic terms. There's Patricia Neal in the Bacall role, the insolent whore, but where Bogie and Bacall are what we all wish we could be, Garfield and Neal come off like sad people at the end of ropes they didn't know would be so short. On the other side—the character who was definitely not in the Hawks version—there's Phyllis Thaxter, much later to be Martha Kent to Christopher Reeve's Superman, as Garfield's long-suffering, very practical wife. She's really good, considering that her character is such a buzz kill by the standards of adventure cinema. It's a weird mix—Howard Hawks meets William Inge—but precisely because I didn't necessarily know where it would go with all the familiar pieces of this story, I found it fresh and enthralling. Not movie magic like the Hawks, but powerful drama, more like other social-realistic noirs of the period like Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (in which Richard Conte is the one trying to make it after the war in the transport business, with a truck rather than a boat).

And then there's Curtiz. Curtiz is an interesting figure in the late 40s because he's one of the ones who never quite made a noir, yet had his fingers all over noir, like Hitchcock. Mildred Pierce, of course, was soap opera noir that took the Stella Dallas maternal-sacrifice genre and wedded it to noir (it was a big hit), and another key film, I think, was Young Man With a Horn, with its influential neorealist cinematography of New York. Ted McCord, an old western hand who suddenly came into better things with the end of the war (he shot Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and his next to last film would be The Sound of Music), shot both Young Man With a Horn and this one, and there's an interesting dialectic going on between Curtiz's glossy framing and McCord's naturalistic, plain-air cinematography—Curtiz will frame Neal or Thaxter from about the 4:00 position relative to their faces, a larger than life framing, and you know he's framing them just like he did Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. But McCord's scupltural modeling in the ultrasharp seaside light is nothing like the glamorous lighting and soft focus of 1943, so it's less like filming a goddess, and more like catching a glimpse of the divine in the face of a sailor's wife.

The visual qualities of the film, and the flawless quality of the surviving material, have to be among the reasons Criterion took a chance on this lesser-known title, and it's well worth seeing for those reasons; audio is uncompressed monaural sound. There are several essays on the film on the disc and in the booklet, including an interview with Alan K. Rode, author of a new Michael Curtiz biography (and soon to be on NitrateVille Radio).

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

I was reading something online where people were asked to name somebody who made nothing but great movies in a streak, and of course they were all pretty recent and very arguable (Paul Thomas Anderson, Oliver Stone, names like that). Nobody even went as far back as Coppola Godfather I to Apocalypse Now, or Kubrick The Killing to Clockwork Orange, let alone to where I would go—Sturges from McGinty to Unfaithfully Yours, say, or Walsh's dozen (!) films in three years from The Roaring Twenties to Gentleman Jim.

Or... Marcel Carne starting with French screwball in Drole de Drame, the invention of film noir with Quai des Brumes, Hotel du Nord and Le Jour Se Leve, and then the Gone With the Wind of classical French cinema, Les Enfants du Paradis. Between the last two, a huge hit in occupied France but comparatively lesser known to us today, is Les Visiteurs du Soir, which adds one more prize to that list: the invention of the Ingmar Bergman film.

In medieval France, two minstrels who are in fact envoys of the Devil arrive at a gleaming white castle/city wall (Alexander Trauner anticipating Derek Jarman's work on The Devils). Though a wedding is impending, everyone seems in a crabby mood. The husband to be is older, cynical and heartless, domineering— and quick prey for one of the envoys, Arletty. The wife to be is an innocent, and when the other envoy (Alain Cuny) toys with her, quickly falls in love. Bad move; their job, as damned souls (they committed murder as adulterers), is to stomp on hearts and embarrass the tempted and, ultimately, to claim them for damnation. But Cuny seems to be wearying of this game and to feel for the girl, and the Devil himself (Jules Berry, chatty and flamboyant) appears to sort things out.

This could easily be a 1950s Bergman film at times, given the superb clarity of the photography of Trauner's cleanly designed sets (crisp and white, they look more like medieval illustrations than reality) and the elliptical nature of the fable-like plot by Jacques Prevert and Pierre LaRoche; only the young woman's 40s hairdo, or when the music enters, a little too Mickey-Mouse-y, gives away that it's a decade or more earlier. Where an American film would be forced to follow Sunday school morality, Prevert & co. have a more complex and ironic view of human nature and temptation, and I was pleasantly surprised by the not easily foreseen turns it took, intelligent and wise—much like The Seventh Seal or The Magician or Smiles of a Summer Night.

Reportedly the biggest hit of the Occupation period in France, it's often described (as so many films are) as an allegory for occupation—and for a long while I just wasn't seeing that. It certainly was nowhere near as direct in that as Tourneur's Le Mains du Diable, which is basically a Gallic version of The Devil and Daniel Webster, with some Monkey's Paw thrown in. The Devil and his envoys were a presence, and malign in their own fashion, but hardly as oppressive as the SS; the husband to be seemed more proto-fascist than they were. Eventually I realized that audiences were responding to a tale in which the characters were simply free to explore their own feelings and their fates—and it was that visible expression of personal freedom, indomitable, that made the film so fresh and captivating when they were living under the all-encompassing state.

Criterion's disc—which I've had for quite a while and never watched—comes from pristine materials which convey the visuals devised by Carne and Trauner in all the clear, clean beauty of their creation. It's surprising to see a film with such hints of abstraction coming right before Les Enfants du Paradis, which teems with all the messy life of 19th century Paris. It's one of the best looking transfers of a 1940s film I've seen put on disc. Besides the film, there's a recent documentary about the film's production, and a booklet essay by Michael Atkinson.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

I watch Children of Paradise every few years, doubt I'll exactly do that.

Thanks. I've put off buying it through last 4 Criterion sales because I have a hard time believing it could be anywhere near as good as Children of Paradise (and yeah, I watch that one again every few years, same as you).

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH (1936) 79 min. ***1/2 (Blu-ray released January 9, 2018)

David O. Selznick's most famous film is about a love that ends when the man doesn't give a damn, but more typical of his films is a tale of love that must endure in extremis and beyond death—a description that fits two Hemingway adaptations (A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls), an epically steamy western (Duel in the Sun) and various other films. Who knows if he had a psychological need being satisfied by such stories or simply recognized a framework that could accommodate the lush, no-holds-barred filmmaking and outsize emotion that he knew would spell box office success, but two such stories produced by Selznick have recently been released by Kino Lorber on blu-ray.

Only the fourth three-strip Technicolor fiction feature made, after Becky Sharp, The Dancing Pirate, and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,The Garden of Allah remakes an old Arabian romance previously filmed by Rex Ingram, among others. Marlene Dietrich plays a girl raised in a convent (!) and long sheltered due to having to care for her dying father; now she wants to finally know the world (!!) and in what seems a clear case of mal-nun-practice, her old Mother Superior sends her into the desert to find life. Cut to a Trappist monastery where a French officer is chatting up the monk in charge and enjoying the liqueur they produce; they send for the man in charge—and he's abandoned his vows and run away.

He, of course, must be Charles Boyer, and he and Dietrich find each other on their way to a tortured romance which will scale the heights and call upon all the powers of Max Steiner and the Technicolor corporation. Objectively it's silly melodrama, made for a Carol Burnett Show sendup, and the plot will turn on ethical questions few today would consider of such dire import—but put your cynicism, your modern rationality, away! This is the Highest Hokum, and it's wonderful—Dietrich genuinely delicate and touching as a woman with bottomless faith in love, Boyer as turbulent as Brando and Peter Lorre combined, and the Technicolor, oh, as early as it is, the photography (Virgil Miller, Harold Rosson and W. Howard Greene, who won a special Oscar for it) anticipates Black Narcissus in its subtlety.

Yes, it's true that they'll stick a big bowl of flowers in the middle of a clinch shot to make sure it has as many colors in the frame as a set of Christmas lights, but the exterior photography in particular is quite lovely—dusk skies shading from blue to pink and orange, riders on horseback silhouetted on a ridge of golden sand. (The shots of Dietrich in color for the first time are pretty great, too, although her thin arched eyebrows make her look like the puppet of Carole Lombard in the opening credits of Nothing Sacred.)

I can't speak to its quality relative to the other releases discussed in this thread, but I can say this: this transfer of a vintage print has a very pleasing, watercolor-like subtlety compared to many of the versions created digitally from the black and white matrices like The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Wizard of Oz, where the color is so vivid it seems impossible and sometimes distractingly intense. At under $20 retail, it's a disc worth having just for that representation of early Technicolor at its most enchanting. The throbbing emotionalism is just a bonus feature. (Apart from that, the only actual bonuses are trailers for other Kino Selznick releases.)

There are certain similarities between The Garden of Allah and Portrait of Jennie— nuns, for one— but the big difference is that where prewar Allah belongs to that ecumenical era when Catholicism had no stronger backer than a Jewish Hollywood producer, postwar Jennie has apparently seen The Razor's Edge, and searches for new— as in New Age— answers. Starting with shots of clouds over which the world's most portentous narrator talks about how throughout history, the greatest thinkers have know that time is life and liberty is true and Collier's is The Saturday Evening Post.

Joseph Cotten is a painter not amounting to much in New York City. He wanders into a gallery run by Cecil Kellaway and Ethel Barrymore and they think his paintings are mediocre, but try to guide him toward finding something real to paint about. Then he meets an odd girl in Central Park, who speaks anachronistically of a New York that no longer exists. A few more meetings, and each time Jennifer Jones as Jennie seems older. He starts sketching her and shows he has real ability at last. But the mystery of Jennie hints at darker things....

It's an effective update of the Selznick formula that what was Victorian in Allah is now closer to The Twilight Zone (though not as close as Dead of Night's sad Victorian ghost girl sequence—Jennie isn't going to get that dark). Before watching these two back to back, I would have said that this was my favorite Selznick fantasy. Alas, this time what stuck out to me glaringly is that it won't shut up. It's got some metaphysical guff to peddle, and it could do it and get it over with, but no, Cotten and Jones wind up talking more and more of it, explaining the ideas of the original author (Robert Nathan, who also wrote The Bishop's Wife) in more detail than they can support. Having seen it at least three times over the years, this was the first time it seemed a bit insufferable. (Jones might have said what Paulette Goddard said of her husband— "He thinks he thinks.")

Which is too bad, because much of Jennie is quite lovely. William Dieterle's direction and the cinematography of Joseph August (a silent veteran going back to Hell's Hinges for William S. Hart, here making his last film) turn snowy, ice skating New York into a magical place; if we buy a lot of this, it's because of the spell those images cast, more genuinely lyrical than almost anything in Hollywood filmmaking since Sunrise and Seventh Heaven. It far outclasses the surf-pounding hurricane ending, full of miniature work, with which Selznick pile-drives his message of love's eternal unstoppability home. As far as the actors go, Jones has never been my cup of tea and Jennie is less character than muse-slash-plot device, but she plays the many ages of Jennie well; Cotten manages to convince us he actually is bright enough to be a great artist, and likable enough that Barrymore indulges him as she does. Tribute to both for triumphing over some of the words put in their mouths.

Scott McQueen did a restoration of this in the 90s, and 90% of it is very good—and more to the point, the parts you'd hope look as good as possible do. There are some battered shots here and there, and the climax—which was tinted green—suffers from solarization (it's green and purple) which among other things, makes the process work more obvious. But on the whole, you will not be sorry that the best part of this film, its visual poetry, looks as good as it does.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

Possibly the most underrated actor of classic Hollywood and one of the very few people Orson Wells never had unkind wordsfor (and that's saying a lot) Joseph Cotten should get a reconsiderationand a box set as well. Portrait of Jennie is a movie that stays with youlong after the last frame flickers by. It has an understated hauntingquality that directors can't seem to pull off these days. Every chill mustbe in CGI form.

One of my favourite films! My purchased DVD copy (NTSC region free) has the correct tinted ending - first green, then sepia, and then the final shot being the portrait in full Technicolor. Would have loved to experience this on the big screen when released, with the ending in large screen Magnascope and stereo sound. Fully deserved Oscar for Visual Effects (pre-CGI). Nice to see Lillian Gish in a small role. A fine fantasy film IMHO always worth watching.

syd wrote:Possibly the most underrated actor of classic Hollywood and one of the very few people Orson Wells never had unkind wordsfor (and that's saying a lot) Joseph Cotten should get a reconsiderationand a box set as well.

Certainly a special edition of The Magnificent Ambersons is in order (still have my Criterion LD), and why Journey Into Fear hasn't surfaced in a format more high-tech than VHS (OK, laserdisc) in North America is beyond me.

s.w.a.c. wrote:Certainly a special edition of The Magnificent Ambersons is in order (still have my Criterion LD), and why Journey Into Fear hasn't surfaced in a format more high-tech than VHS (OK, laserdisc) in North America is beyond me.

Journey into Fear now exists in competing versions, one closer to the original Welles cut, one the theatrical release, and another that ties the two together.

syd wrote:Possibly the most underrated actor of classic Hollywood and one of the very few people Orson Wells never had unkind wordsfor (and that's saying a lot) Joseph Cotten should get a reconsiderationand a box set as well.

Certainly a special edition of The Magnificent Ambersons is in order (still have my Criterion LD), and why Journey Into Fear hasn't surfaced in a format more high-tech than VHS (OK, laserdisc) in North America is beyond me.